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Available again, the classic, unprecedented look at how the strategies and ideals of the Third Reich were informed by Adolf Hitler's artistic aspirations. "Grimly fascinating . . . A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism. . . . Invaluable." --The New York Times
This book is about Hitler's interest in the arts; it discusses the ways he used the arts to fulfil his vision of a national socialist state. It includes a section on Hitler's use of architecture as a political tool.
A startling reassessment of Hitler's aims and motivations, Spotts's "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics" is an adroitly argued and highly original work that provides the key to a fuller understanding of the Third Reich.
The German occupation of France from 1940 to 1945 presented wrenching challenges for the nation's artists and intellectuals. Some were able to flee the country; those who remained—including Gide and Céline, Picasso and Matisse, Cortot and Messiaen, and Cocteau and Gabin—responded in various ways. This fascinating book is the first to provide a full account of how France's artistic leaders coped under the crushing German presence. Some became heroes, others villains; most were simply survivors. Filled with anecdotes about the artists, composers, writers, filmmakers, and actors who lived through the years of occupation, the book illuminates the disconcerting experience of life and work within a cultural prison. Frederic Spotts uncovers Hitler's plan to pacify the French through an active cultural life, and examines the unexpected vibrancy of opera, ballet, painting, theater, and film in both the Occupied and Vichy Zones. In view of the longer-term goal to supplant French with German culture, Spotts offers moving insight into the predicament of French artists as they fought to preserve their country's cultural and national identity.
Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann’s comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies—among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues—amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citiz...
Hitler's aims and motivations have been reassessed to examine his perverse obsessions and show how his artistry destroyed any sense of individuality and linked the German people with his own drives.
Providing an overall account of the history of the Wagner festival, a critical analysis of its performers, productions, and enthusiasts establishes its remarkable beginnings, controversial associations, and surprising successes
Italy is the world's sixth economic power, lies in a key geopolitical position, and was a founding member of NATO and the European Community. Yet of all the major European states Italy is the least understood and studied. This book provides the only up-to-date survey of the Italian political scene during the forty years since World War II. It describes the inner-dynamics of the political parties, the day-to-day functioning of the governing institutions, and the interaction of the country's economic, social, and political life. It shows how a political system, riven with difficulties and seemingly in a continual crisis, survives and prospers - in some ways more successfully than its purportedly better-governed neighbours. Based on the authors' first-hand observations of Italian politics, the book offers a valuable insight into a subtle and complex, but fascinating political world.
These 600 letters of Leonard Woolf begin in 1901 during his undergraduate years and end in 1969, shortly before his death. Although he has been overshadowed by worldwide fascination with his wife, Virginia, his no less interesting and varied career merits attention in its own right.;His correspondents range from Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, C. Day-Lewis, Peggy Ashcroft and Sylvia Townsend Warner to Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Sigmund and Anna Freud, John Maynard Keynes, G.E. Moore and H.G. Wells. The book contains every letter to Virginia Woolf, as well as exchanges with doctors concerning her mental illness and suicide. The letters show him as a man who worked all his professional life for a democratic socialist society, decolonization, racial and sexual equality and the establishment of a peaceful international order.
In this second installment of his autobiography (following Kind dieser Zeit), Klaus Mann describes his childhood in the family of Thomas Mann and his circle, his adolescence in the Weimar Republic, and his experiences as a young homosexual and early opponent of Nazism. He also describes how, after the Reichstag elections of September 1930, friends and family began to discuss the looming prospect of emigration and exile. When Stefan Zweig published an article claiming that democracy was ineffective, Klaus replied: “I want to have nothing, nothing at all to do with this perverse kind of ‘radicalism.’” After hearing one of his working-class lovers in a storm trooper’s uniform say, “...